HE was beaten at school. He was once a bouncer for The Beatles.

HE was beaten at school. He was once a bouncer for The Beatles. He persuaded The National Trust to buy one of Paul McCartney's old Liverpool homes. He gave us Blind Date.

And he even got his hands dirty helping to lay the sewers for a housing estate in Formby.

Oh, and he also worked his way to the top of, in his words, "the greatest cultural institution in the world" - the BBC.

So, John Birt. How did all that happen, then?

John (he doesn't mind me calling him 'John,' I asked him), has been a London boy for a long time.

He lives in Baywater, with his American wife, Jane, and we met in the offices of his publishers next to Waterloo Bridge, to discuss his autobiography (The Harder Path, Time Warner, #20).

But the so-called capital was soon forgotten as we talked about ...

* Liverpool (he was born in Walton Hospital 57 years ago).

* Bootle (he spent the first three years of his life in University Road).

* Formby (the family moved to Lonsdale Road) Crosby (he studied at St Mary's College).

* Southport (he first saw The Beatles here and his grandparents had an off-licence - a corner house off Bispham Road).

The eyes of the Lord (sorry, John) lit up as each affectionate anecdote from his Mersey days was delivered. One or two high-profile things may have happened to him in London since then, but John Birt will always be a Scouser.

He says: "I hope I picked up Liverpool's vitality and its sense of rebelliousness in challenging the existing order, which I think Liverpool people have always done and continue to do.

"And, from my family, a sense of duty and a very powerful work ethic, in that you have to create something of value every day you live. I think I left Liverpool with all of those things."

His birth, during an air-raid warning on December 10, 1944, brought about a family reunion. His mother, Ida, a Protestant, had married Leo, a Catholic - and Ida's parents, John's Nanna Anna and Grandad Joe, carried out their threat to throw her out of their house and her job at their dockland canteen in Strand Road, Bootle.

The building which housed the flat in University Road, Bootle, where John spent his first three years, has long gone, but the author has fond memories of the area.

His "respectable working class" parents - his dad worked for the Pru and, later, as a salesman for Firestone Tyres - bought a semi in Lonsdale Road, Formby in 1947, and the author says: "Formby was a kind of suburban bliss - for my parents the promised land. But I found Formby dull. I came alive when I stayed with my cousins in Bootle."

John, who has a younger sister, Angela, who runs a charity in Cambridge, and a younger brother, Michael, a much-travelled free-lance photographer, also has memories - not all fond ones - of St Mary's College in Crosby, where he was educated by the Irish Christian Brothers, with help from lay teachers.

He stresses: "It's a different school now, to be fair. Plainly, the 1950s regime no longer applies. You have to have a balanced picture. The Irish Christian Brothers were dedicated to encouraging the upward-mobility of the Catholic working class.

"In terms of passing exams, you had a jolly good education. This was a highly efficient and effective school and legions of us went off to university and some of us went off to Oxford and Cambridge.

"So you have to be grateful for that and, along the way, some absolutely wonderful teachers who changed your life.

"Mr Cooper didn't just teach me maths he taught me to love it. Mr Kelly was a wonderful, idealisitc and energetic man who made me the first president of the school's St Vincent de Paul Society, which he founded. Not only did it give me a sense of public service, but my first experience of command."

But then there was the violence. John recalls: "The basic form of punishment was the strap and it was overdone. It didn't affect me as much as many of the boys because I was a bright student, although if there was talking in class the whole class got beaten. There were kids for whom it was very traumatic. You weren't just beaten for not having done your work or for laziness, some kids were beaten if they weren't able enough.

"The Polish woodwork teacher, nicknamed 'Doo-Dah', would strap you if your joints weren't tight, then punch you in the kidneys as a follow-up.

"Violence was the constant backdrop of everyday life. There was general agreement that Brother Brickley - Brickhead - who taught us Latin, was the most effective strapper. He called his strap 'Excalibur'. Every stroke counted with Brother Brickley."

But while he loathed the school's "repressive atmosphere" he stresses that he was not unhappy at school. He says of his former schoolfriends: "All confess, like me, that they feel guilty if they are not doing something worthwhile, if they are not working. St Mary's may have affected them, but it did not scar them."

In the summer of 1962, the hardworking student (nickname "Trib" - Birt backwards) took a holiday job as a waiter at a municipal cafe in Southport, when The Beatles came to play at the Corporation's Cambridge Hall - and he, together with a friend from St Mary's, earned some overtime as bouncers who would guard John, Paul, George and Pete Best's dressing room.

He recalls: "One of the fans was well-known to us: she was the most beautiful girl in Formby. She pleaded with us to let her in to see Paul. My friend said 'We'll let you in if you let us have a snog and a feel.' She immediately agreed and led us off to some backstairs.

"To my shame, even at the time, I participated in the encounter despite her inert response."

What a rotter. What a bounder. What a cad.

Bitten by the Merseybeat bug, he and a couple of pals recorded a song called The Liverpool Wall. He and his mates sent it to a record company. They're still waiting for a response.

But perhaps he can be forgiven for that "song," having been the person who persuaded the National Trust to buy McCartney's former home - 20, Forthlin Road, Allerton (inset picture).

John noticed it was for sale during a weekend visit to Liverpool in 1995.

John left Merseyside - for St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he got a third-class degree in engineering - in autumn 1963, but not before spending two months helping to lay the sewers on a new housing estate near Wicks Lane, Formby.

He remembers: "My Liverpudlian workmates teased me about going to Oxford, but accepted me as their mascot, as someone from the same background as them moving onto a better life, and wished me well."

After Oxford, where he was far more interested in film and TV than engineering, he climbed the media ladder of success - despite an initial rejection from the BBC! He joined Granada TV as a production trainee and, when part of its World In Action team, arranged a landmark interview with Mick Jagger in 1967 after the Rolling Stone won an appeal against a three-month jail sentence for possession of drugs.

Later, the father-of-two (JJ, 34 and Eliza, 31) produced the entertainment show Nice Time, which was presented - in their first TV roles - by Germaine Greer and fellow Scouser Kenny Everett.

He recalls: "Shortly before he died of Aids in 1995, aged 50, he confessed - with a look that combined both a gleam of mischief and a tear - to having the fondest feelings for me."

John left Granada for London Weekend Television at the end of 1971, working on The Frost Programme and then Weekend World, before becoming LWT's head of current affairs.

In 1977, he was named LWT's controller of features and current affairs and, three years later, was interviewed for the job of founding chief executive of Channel 4 - he lost out to Jeremy Isaacs. And so John stayed on at

LWT, where he was Director Of Programmes from 1981 until he became deputy director-general of the BBC in 1987. Two years earlier, Blind Date began on ITV: "I caught Cilla Black on Jimmy Tarbuck's LWT talk show . . . I saw in an instant she was the right presenter for Blind Date."

John even held a couple of "Scouse lunches" at his former Wandsworth home: "Jimmy and Cilla came along, along with other expats like Anne Robinson, Roger McGough and Robert Runcie, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.